Ana Mengotti |
Miami (USA) (EFE).- The Spanish writer Mario Escobar rescues in the novel “A free man”, which has just been published in the US, the figure of his compatriot Francisco de Enzinas (1518-1552), the first translator of the New Testament into Spanish, whom he sees as an example of “tolerance” for today’s world.
“I think that what it can bring us is a bit of sanity in a time like ours, in which radicalism is once again gaining strength in every way,” Escobar said in a telephone interview with EFE.
De Enzinas, also known as Franciscus Dryander, was a pioneer in many things, the writer says of this son of a wealthy Burgos wool merchant family who sided with the Protestant Reformation and lived much of his life outside of Spain, always persecuted by the Inquisition.
His younger brother, Diego de Enzinas, died at the stake for his ideas, but he was killed by the plague in Strasbourg, after having lived in various cities in what are now Belgium and Germany and also in England, where he moved fleeing from the Inquisition, and having traveled through other European countries.
It was at the University of Leuven where he came into contact with Protestantism, to which he became openly linked from 1541 and became the first Spaniard to enroll in the German University of Wittenberg, the cradle of the Reformation.
The first New Testament and the first memoir
Escobar says that De Enzinas was a pioneer in many things, including writing the first book of memoirs, an autobiography, written in Spanish, as well as translating the New Testament from Greek into Spanish for the first time.
“Francisco de Enzinas is a forgotten figure, perhaps because of his heterodoxy, not only by the religious,” says Escobar, whose novels, like those dedicated to Nazism – “They promised us glory”, “Lullaby in Auschwitz” or ” The children of the yellow star”-, have been published successfully in the US.
Escobar declares himself a “craftsman of books”, because for his novels he is usually inspired by real stories with which he falls in love and sets out to find how to tell them, he tells EFE.
In this case, he approached De Enzinas because of his interesting life and because, as the title of the novel says, he was a “free man” in the sense that he defended “freedom of conscience, which makes a person the owner of your destiny”.
“He was a man who had it all. He belonged to one of the richest families in Castilla at that time, his father was one of the biggest wool entrepreneurs with branches in various places in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe and he leaves everything to follow his vocation. underlines.
Escobar points out that he lived through a time of much controversy and violence, the time of the wars of religion that bloodied Europe, in which Spain represented Catholicism at all costs.
“That a Spaniard became a Protestant at a time when religion and the State were united meant that he could not be a good Spaniard,” he says.
However, De Enzinas considered himself a good subject of Emperor Charles I of Spain and V of Germany, who he came to ask in person to approve his New Testament (1543) so that everyone could read it, because he thought that this benefited the Empire.
In the novel, published by BH Publishing Group, it is narrated that the emperor asked him who had written the New Testament and, after he answered “the Holy Spirit”, approved its publication, although the book was never allowed to circulate in Spain.
Escobar points out that De Enzinas and other reformers were the ones who began to talk about freedom of conscience, tolerance towards the ideas of others and respect for the rights of others, when “the majority thought that violence is legitimate, that the subject had to be subject to political power and did not have the right to express an opinion for himself.
When asked to analyze the current moment of the historical novel in Spain, he points out that it had great strength until the economic crisis that began in 2008, when the detective novel gained more weight, and now there is a resurgence again but with more local works, of characters and facts of a city or a region.